Last Thursday, the sentiment in the Washington Senate room was unmistakable, with politicians and tech bosses debating artificial intelligence. The consensus is that in the latest technological weapons competition, deregulation and accelerate investment are crucial. Meanwhile, Europe was ridiculed as AI-RAN and was in trouble with the "suffocation" regulations.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz played softball to tech executives and asked: How harmful would it be if the United States followed the EU's huge regulatory process for AI? "I think it's disastrous," Sam Altman, CEO of Openai replied.
Deregulation and acceleration may be Washington's slogan after President Donald Trump tore up his predecessor's executive order on AI. Later, Republicans invested nearly $100 million in the industry. However, this worldview is obviously not shared nationwide. According to the National Legislative Council meeting, hazards are covered, such as in the case of elections, employment discrimination and lack of consumer protection, such as thirty-one U.S. states have passed AI resolutions or laws. This year, NCSL has launched another 550 AI-related bills in 45 states.
Most of these moves will fail, just like California’s Landmark AI Act last year, but may pass. Unrestricted, this could lead to the U.S. having “an inconsistent legal network that disperses national policies, delays innovation, and expands AI systems for cross-state line ranges,” warned Daniel Castro, the Center for Data Innovation. It seems that the United States may end up being more "European" than Europe in terms of technical regulations.
That fear prompted House Republicans to push this week a legislative amendment that would revoke state AI laws and impose a moratorium on any new laws within a decade. The move was condemned by state representative and AI researcher Gary Marcus. "Relaxation for decades is not the way forward. It is abdication of responsibility," they wrote in an open letter.
Opposition politicians also stressed the hypocrisy of respecting state rights when regulating women’s bodies, but abandoning consumers when protecting them from powerful technological interests. Now, fierce battles between Washington and the state may break out, who has the right to regulate or relax technology.
At the state level, the “incredible motivation” to fill the regulatory vacuum of Washington’s inaction. She said states are determined to deal with the most abominable, harmful and problematic use cases of AI. She told me: "In today's world, they are the only people who can move this regulatory agenda forward. I think states see the gap very much, for a moment, and get them up."
But the decentralization of state legislation related to AI that affects data privacy and self-driving cars can cause real complications for many companies. This is especially true in some traditional sectors, such as financial services and medicine, because financial services and medicine, are wary of adopting AI services due to lack of trust in untested AI systems and lack of clear mitigation measures, said Rumman Chowdhury, a nonprofit humanitarian intelligence company. "Regulations don't kill innovation. Regulations can achieve that," she told me.
This suggests that state regulatory activism may force Washington to act, especially seeing some members of the Maga crowd support a more interventionist approach. "Currently, a nail salon in Washington, D.C. is more than these four people running on AI. We don't have earthly ideas," former Trump aide Steve Bannon said in Washington, D.C. "I think we should have huge rules on AI."
Even anti-regulatory missionary Cruz accepts the need to act in some cases. Together with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, he co-sponsored the recent bipartisan to place it in a shared criminal offense that puts AI-generated sexual abuse material. The legislation was also supported by First Lady Melania Trump. Along the way, there may be many strange alliances and unpredictable twists and turns, but AI is even in the United States.
john.thornhill@ft.com